


The Material Properties of Memory

by ignipes



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-18
Updated: 2011-09-18
Packaged: 2017-10-23 20:43:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/254785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignipes/pseuds/ignipes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was exquisite and exhilarating and there was nothing like it in the world, but it was also terrifying. Emma wasn't foolish enough to deny that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Material Properties of Memory

Emma felt the boy die from two floors below.

She had just opened the door to the stairwell. The hospital was a seething tangle of scattered thoughts and desperate pain, the patients crying outwardly and screaming inside their heads, fearful and paranoid. She wanted to close her mind to it, but she was listening for the boy, and she was listening when he died.

Rat poison. He had stolen rat poison from the maintenance closet on the first floor while the orderlies had been distracted by another patient's fit. Nobody had seen him. He had hidden it beneath his cot for three days, waiting for the courage and the opportunity.

His mind was racing as he died - _didn't know it would hurt so much oh god mom dad it hurts so much_ \- and so Emma was thinking as well - _don't want to die oh please mom I don't want to die_ \- and she tasted the vomit in his throat - _burns it hurts I didn't know please_ \- and the convulsions wracking his body - _they're gonna hear I don't want them to hear I hope they hear_ \- and the last feeble breaths through his gasping mouth, through the bile and poison and remains of the tasteless meal he had eaten a few hours before.

Then he died. Emma shifted into diamond, reflexively, automatically, and the world was silent and empty.

When she was steady again, Emma returned to flesh and blood. _Mystique,_ she said. She felt the other woman's awareness, quick to respond. _There's nothing here for us. We're leaving._

A quick flicker of question in Mystique's mind: _What's wrong?_

 _The boy is dead_ , she said. _You have the files?_

 _I have them. He had them all together in a drawer._

Emma saw the doctor's office, the drawer of his desk, Mystique's clumsy but effective picking of the lock. _Meet me outside,_ she said.

Five minutes later were in the car and pulling away from the hospital. Mystique still wore the body of the night nurse, a sturdy women in her fifties, and there was confusion and worry spiking through her mind. "What the hell happened? Why did we leave?"

"He's dead," Emma said. _Rat poison._

Mystique flinched. "Oh. Oh, that's awful." She shivered and shook herself, and she was blue and naked again, her yellow eyes large in the darkness. "That place must have been hell for him."

The boy had been a patient at the hospital for months, but Emma's contacts had only learned of his existence that morning, after a violent incident with another patient. From what Emma had gleaned from the minds of the doctors and nurses, the boy could sense other people's emotions, but he couldn't control it, didn't understand it, had no desire to explore it. He had spent months looking for a way to die. The fight that morning had been excuse enough.

Only one doctor at the hospital had suspected there was anything unusual about the boy; his files were the ones resting in a stack on Mystique's lap. They weren't in the habit of approaching young lunatics with strategically useless powers in psychiatric institutions. As Erik was fond of reminding them, they had far more important work to do. But when Emma had said she was going to investigate – in a tone of voice that dared anybody to disagree – Mystique had promptly volunteered to go with her. "Why not?" she had said, before anybody could ask why. "I want to practice playing doctor."

"How old?" Emma asked. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel and wished there were more lights along the road. The hospital was located in the country, surrounded by hills and forests and farms, and the narrow glow of the headlights was the only light she could see.

Mystique frowned, then began to shuffle through the files on her lap. "The kid? I don't know, let me find--"

"Not him," Emma said. She felt Mystique's confusion but didn't delve into it. She had touched far too many minds tonight, and her own thoughts felt raw and bruised. "You've been in a place like that before. How old were you?"

"Oh, that," Mystique said, and Emma felt the wash of understanding. "I wasn't, though. That is - I was, but only to visit. It was Charles. But you knew that already, didn't you?"

Emma had suspected as much, but she didn't need to be a telepath to know that the topic of Charles Xavier and hospitals was a touchy one with Mystique lately. She said, "Parents rarely react well to the revelation that their child is hearing voices."

"Did yours?" Mystique asked. A heartbeat later, Emma felt her fear at having asked, but she didn't retract the question.

"I hid it well," Emma said. She and her sisters, they had all hid it so very well, from their father, from each other, from the rest of the world. Everybody had been too concerned with their brother's mundane struggles to notice the eccentricities of the Frost girls until they were old enough to keep their own secrets.

"Charles did too, by the time I met him," Raven said. She shrugged a little, her scaled shoulders rasping against the seat. "But then he--"

Mystique fell silent, but there was a flurry of memories in her mind: promises and sandwiches in a dark kitchen, stolen clothes and empty rooms in an echoing mansion. There were three people Emma didn't know but had glimpsed in Mystique's thoughts before, a man and a woman and a teenage boy - not Charles Xavier but another, bigger and scowling – and there was confusion on their faces, fear, anger, ringing shouts now wordless and jumbled in memory. Then it all melted away to an eerie, cold blankness, as though they weren't people at all but porcelain dolls, frozen and lifeless.

"He made them believe I'd always been there," Mystique said quietly. She rarely spoke about her childhood, and in the quiet of the dark car, on the empty road, the thoughts that bled around her words were pained but calm. She wanted to talk, so Emma let her. "Orphaned daughter of a long lost cousin. From California. He'd never been to California, didn't know anything about it except that's where they make movies and there are roads with palm trees along them, but that's what he told them. Made them believe. It was – he kind of lost control of his powers for a bit after that, and they sent him back to the hospital. He was eleven, that time."

 _Eleven_ , Emma repeated.

Mystique only shrugged again. "Charles's stepfather wasn't a very nice person. He didn't like having a stepson at all, much less one who was sometimes a little bit crazy." _He would have had Charles institutionalized permanently if he could, so he could claim the money,_ and there were flames around that memory, flames in a dark laboratory, tears and scars and heart-stopping fear, but distant, removed, as though Mystique had been frightened at the time but now felt nothing more than mild relief.

 _Eleven_ , Emma thought again, but she kept it to herself. She turned Mystique's disorganized memories over, examined them from every angle. Emma could certainly alter the memories of two adults and a teenager to convince them they had a relative they hadn't known the day before, and she could probably make it permanent. But she wouldn't have been able to do it at eleven years old. At eleven, Emma had only just begun hearing the thoughts of others, and she had been flickering uncontrollably between flesh and diamond in bed every night, horrified and confused and determined to never let anybody know. She had imagined their Boston house to be the Earth itself, her bedroom a solitary cavern beneath the ground, solid rock pressing into her from every side until she had trembled with the effort of stopping the transformation.

"Your brother is a rather frightening man," Emma said.

Mystique laughed, as Emma had expected. "Believe me, he's not. He's ridiculous, really." And there was the expected stab of wild guilt - _he can't even walk now everything he wanted to do how will he_ \- cut off swiftly and politely ignored.

Mystique wouldn't understand, of course. She couldn't. She didn't know the breath and pulse of other people's minds. She didn't know how malleable and suggestible every thought could be, if you only knew where to push and where to pull. For all the dull sameness in people, there was incomprehensible variety as well. Memories changed and shifted constantly until the truth was unrecognizable. An experience that might twist one mind to hatred could persuade another to love. All individual thoughts were different if you examined them closely, like snowflakes melting on dark wool. To change a person's mind had the dangerous, reckless feeling of setting an avalanche in motion.

It was exquisite and exhilarating and there was nothing like it in the world, but it was also terrifying. Emma wasn't foolish enough to deny that. It was just as terrifying as everything in the world that was worth having and worth doing should be.

-

It was late by the time they returned to the safe house – none of them called it _home_ , not even in their minds – but Angel and Erik were still awake. They were sitting at the kitchen table with an unrolled set of blueprints before them, mugs of cooling coffee holding down the corners. They both looked up when Emma and Mystique entered.

"Well?" Erik said. He didn't expect anything from them; he had thought from the start that Emma's errand was a waste of time.

"We were too late," Mystique said. She glanced at Emma, uncertainty rippling over her thoughts, then snapping smooth as she decided not to say more.

Emma saw the knives and blood and anger in Erik's mind – it was reflexive with him, and more than a bit tiresome to endure on a daily basis – and rolled her eyes.

"Don't be ridiculous," Emma said, with an unsubtle mental nudge. If Erik noticed, he was getting better at hiding it. "The child wasn't right in the mind. He would have been useless."

It was hardly her best effort at misdirection, but it was enough, and Erik put it aside entirely when Mystique leaned over his shoulder and said brightly, "Hey, are we going to steal something?"

Emma never quite understood the point of stealing anything yourself when it was so much easier to telepathically manipulate somebody else into doing it for you. But Erik didn't trust Emma, and Angel and Mystique had both recently developed an enthusiastic talent for breaking into government buildings. Emma supposed she was glad they were going to the trouble at all. A lifetime spent hunting and assassinating Nazi war criminals may not have taught Erik Lehnsherr the value of teamwork, but it had at least taught him the importance of intelligence gathering.

Emma took the doctor's files from Mystique and retreated into the room she had claimed for herself. She shifted into her diamond form - shut out the stray ends of their thoughts and worries, shut out the persistent clamor of careless minds - and she began to read.

-

In the morning, Emma told the others she was returning to the city for business. She could only afford to spend one or two nights a week with them anyway, and she had them all very well-trained to keep their questions to themselves, even Erik. Unlike Sebastian, he was perfectly willing to let her run her business and her club without interference. He claimed it was safer for their cause if he didn't know where her money and connections came from, but Emma knew in truth he was simply bored to distraction by the details.

She could have left the business to one of her subordinates, but she choose to suffer through the meetings herself at the Frost International offices in Manhattan. Men in their overpriced suits and the ties their wives had given to them for Christmas smiled and nodded, shuffled their papers and stared at her breasts, lied to her face and thought about how they would fuck the icy demeanor out of her. And across the table Emma smiled when they did, nodded with they did, and picked their minds clean of corporate secrets and business plans and petty personal lies. Emma never underestimated the value of listening in on the thoughts of those who were otherwise occupied; she had learned far more about the government's covert operations and classified intelligence during her time as a guest of the CIA than she had in all the years she spent tempering Sebastian Shaw's delusions into reasonable plans.

At the end of the day, Emma bowed out of a business dinner with a manufacturing tycoon – he was exactly as insulted as she intended, and would react with predictable masculine stupidity – and dismissed her driver. She drove herself out of the city, through the traffic humming and honking in a soothing cacophony around her. The stolen doctor's files were in a briefcase on the seat beside her.

Charles Xavier's mansion was easy enough to find. Emma had plucked the location from Mystique's mind very early in their acquaintance, but hadn't bothered to verify it in person before. Emma had checked that the CIA and military had no knowledge of the place; whatever Xavier had done to make them ignore him, it was working.

Emma parked a ways down the dark road, spared a moment to regret her choice of shoes, and took the briefcase from the passenger seat. She didn't know what kind of defenses the Xavier property had about its perimeter, so she shifted into her diamond form before she opened the gate and walked through.

No alarms sounded that she could hear, and when she shed her diamond form she felt no spikes of sudden awareness from the house at the end of the long driveway. It was after ten o'clock and only a few of the house's half a dozen residents were still awake: a quick, bright mind racing with chemical equations that meant nothing to Emma, and another that was softer, quieter, listening to music in a darkened bedroom, humming along as he drifted to sleep. There was a child somewhere in the house – a girl, far younger than anyone Mystique and Erik knew about, already asleep and dreaming gentle, childish dreams.

And there--

 _Good evening, Miss Frost._

There was suspicion in the greeting, and a dark shadow of fear, but the curiosity was stronger. Emma said nothing, did nothing, let Xavier pick over her mind and see what she wanted him to see, to learn that she was alone and had no intention of harming him or the children. It took only a moment; it was so much more efficient than trying to use words.

 _You might as well come in,_ Xavier said.

At once, with no sense of invasion whatsoever, Emma knew which door to use and which path to follow to the library on the ground floor. Her footsteps echoed down the long corridor. No doubt Xavier had warned the others about her presence, but she saw nobody.

The library door was open just a few inches and yellow light slanted across the dark hallway. Emma tapped lightly on the door and pushed it open.

"I'm not one to complain about a visit from a beautiful woman in the middle of the night," Charles Xavier said, "but this is quite a surprise."

Emma shut the door behind her and turned to face him. "I would have called first," she said, "but I'm afraid your number is rather difficult to track down."

The worry shifted into open amusement, and there was a flicker of a smile on Xavier's face. _Not for somebody with your resources, surely,_ he said. "You could have brought your car up the driveway. We do have security measures in place, but we rarely shoot on sight. Would you like a drink? Please, sit down."

Emma didn't acknowledge the warning given and received: Xavier had been aware of her presence before she'd stepped through the gate.

"If it's not too much trouble," Emma replied.

She regretted her choice of words as she watched Xavier maneuver his wheelchair slowly and clumsily to the low cabinet on the other side of the room. Emma had kept track of his recovery even though both Mystique and Erik claimed they didn't care to know; just because they preferred selfish denial to potentially valuable information didn't mean she had to as well. She knew Xavier had been out of the hospital for three months, although he had returned briefly for another round of surgery six weeks ago. Glancing around the library, she saw how the furniture had been moved aside and rugs had been rolled away, revealing scattered square blocks of unfaded wooden floor.

Xavier considered briefly how to wheel himself while carrying drinks – a stray thought he didn't bother to hide from Emma – then set the bottle and two glasses in his lap before taking hold of the wheels again.

He said nothing inwardly or aloud as he poured the drinks. His hand shook slightly as he passed the glass over, and Emma made herself stop teasing at the edges of his mind to look closer at his person. He was barefoot and his clothes were wrinkled, and he looked small and pale slumped in the wheelchair. It wasn't fear or nerves that made his hand shake, but exhaustion tinged with pain.

But his eyes were sharp and clear, and Emma felt his mind waiting, watching her from every angle without pressing in, wary and bright. He said, "You're not a wanted woman anymore." It wasn't a question.

"No," Emma said. "I'm not." A bit of memory alteration, erasure of a few official files, a spot of ordinary bribery, and Emma was free now, her record as clean as it had ever been. There were few people in the world as easy to manipulate as agents of the United States government.

"What do you want, Miss Frost?"

Emma opened the briefcase and removed the stack of medical files. "I think these might be of interest to you." With a smooth rush of thought she showed him the hospital, the doctor with a quiet interest in unusual mental patients, a terrified boy with the taste of rat poison on his tongue.

"That poor child," Xavier murmured. He opened the first file and read quickly. Emma felt the moment he reached the doctor's recounting of what had triggered the boy's mental breakdown: the child's family had witnessed a bus crash. _He felt all those people die,_ an echo colored with sadness, one Emma wasn't entirely sure she was meant to hear. Emma had felt people die before, nearby and from a distance, but never a large number of them, and not since she had learned to protect her own mind. It was all too easy to imagine how that might have shattered the boy's mind.

"It didn't even occur to me at the time, to be honest," Xavier said.

Emma blinked, briefly uncertain, and a second later caught up with the thought that Xavier had answered before it had even coalesced: overlapping images of a beach in Cuba, blinding sun and gritty sand. She had taken the memories of that day from each of her colleagues; they all remembered it differently, and the differences grew as time passed, as was the way with all memories. She searched for Xavier's version of events, but he turned her away, gently but firmly, as effective as shutters closed over windows.

"It would have been unpleasant for me, I suppose," he went on, still reading the files, the doctor's handwritten notes running over his thoughts. "But I was far more concerned about the beginning of a global nuclear war. That would have been unpleasant for everyone."

"Even us?" Emma said, slanted and deliberately wry. "But we are the children of the atom."

Xavier laughed. "That is precisely why those who would struggle through high school biology ought never become megalomaniacal war criminals. It's terribly embarrassing to see such profound failures of modern scientific theory writ large across the mind of someone who is trying to kill you." Xavier sipped from his drink and regarded Emma for a moment before speaking. "And the other patients?"

She had no trouble following the shift this time. Emma spent most every day of her life restraining herself in conversation, holding herself back from answering questions before they were asked, forcing herself to respond to what was said aloud rather than the thought behind it. She had been doing it for so long it was second nature by now, but it was tiresome and never became less so. It was remarkably, refreshingly comfortable to speak with somebody who understood that every true conversation occurred on three or four simultaneous layers beneath the spoken words.

"Other doctors, other hospitals," Emma said. "You may be able to track them down."

Xavier paged through the files on the top of the stack, his eyes scanning back and forth as he read. "Chlorpromazine has no affect whatsoever on a patient with telepathic ability," he said. "Unless one considers sedating a patient into insensibility a viable treatment. An observant doctor should have noticed no decrease is psychotic episodes – ah, I see, at least one did. Although his choice of electroshock as the next course of action can't have clarified matters. It's amazing what conclusions they'll draw to avoid the obvious."

There was another current of thought underlying Xavier's words: diagrams of circuitry and equations, a sleek metal sphere and numbers sparking in lines. _It is similar, but the differences are pronounced,_ he said, at the brush of Emma's unspoken question. He didn't fully understand the machine's construction himself, so he had no fear of her stealing it from him. _Cerebro doesn't so much induce a convulsive seizure as nudge the mind to the edge of one and hold it there._ "Far less painful, if properly calibrated."

And beneath even that – merely a glimpse; Xavier's mind was quick and complex – a white ceiling and a while light, white-clad nurses leaning like marble statues, leathers straps around the arms and chest. A child's memory, exaggerated and overexposed, the sharp edges dulled with time.

Xavier closed the files and set them aside. "Why did you bring these to me? You could find these people yourself, if that's what you want."

 _You have to ask?_

Xavier regarded her for a moment. There were dark circles under his eyes; his body's pain and discomfort kept him awake most nights, or so he wanted Emma to believe.

 _No,_ he said finally. _I don't have to._

Their first meeting, across the warm water on a warm night in Florida, encountering Charles Xavier's mind had felt like slamming a car into a brick wall at sixty miles per hour. Great power, but no finesse, easy enough for Emma to throw off. Emma had been the first telepath he'd encountered; he had no idea how to match somebody who could do what he could. Their second meeting, in the bedroom of that vile Russian, Emma had been unfortunately distracted – angry at being sent away as a decoy to Shaw's tantrum, disgusted by the company she had to endure – but Xavier hadn't been any more subtle. It would certainly have been a more interesting fight, if it had gone that far.

But now – now it felt less like staring down the headlights on an out-of-control vehicle and more like standing in a well-lit room surrounded by windows on a dark night, teased by the suspicion that there was something beyond the weak reflections in the glass, something looking in from the forest outside, a presence sly and catlike and nimble. She knew he was there, felt where he brushed up against what she kept hidden, but his touch was light, might have been imperceptible if she weren't looking for it.

Emma raised her glass in a mocking toast. _You're learning to be sneaky, Professor Xavier._

Xavier grinned. _Thank you, Miss Frost._ He finished the last of the whiskey and said, "We'll look for these patients, of course. If they are mutants, they need help psychiatric hospitals cannot provide." _They need to know they aren't mad._

There was an old hurt beneath his thoughts, throbbing like a long-healed broken bone in changeable weather, but Emma let it be.

After a moment, Xavier said, "I wonder how many of us there are." _I'm not the first you've met._

Emma didn't deny it, but she kept the names to herself. _You've been looking for others,_ she said. Not just telepaths, not just those with wealth or power or influence, but all mutants. Erik and Mystique had been wrong to assume – to insist - that being paralyzed would put Xavier off his plans for months or longer.

 _So have you,_ Xavier said. Emma nodded.

He wasn't going to ask. Emma realized it with startling certainty, just as she realized she had been waiting for the question since she had stepped into the room. He wanted to. He wanted to more than anything, so strongly the yearning glowed at the forefront of his mind. But he was angry and prideful and stubborn and uncertain – most of all angry, so very angry, the hot, bitter feel of it was so encompassing that prying it out from amongst the rest of his thoughts was like identifying individual snowflakes in a blizzard. He wasn't going to ask.

Emma sat back in her chair with deliberate casualness. "She's doing quite well," she said.

Xavier said nothing aloud, but in his mind the words ran together - _Raven-Mystique-dearest-sister-friend_ \- each half a beat behind the previous, blurring into a knot of affection and sadness, love and betrayal. She was blue in his thoughts, scales and yellow eyes and ringing laughter, but years younger than she was life.

"She's learning remarkable control over her ability," Emma went on. She tilted her glass slowly, let the last of the whiskey run in an amber circle around the bottom. "She can mimic gestures, tics, affectations with impressive accuracy, and she's very good with voices as well." Emma didn't say _she's happy_ , because she doubted it was the truth. She didn't say _she misses you_ , because she knew it was.

"Thank you," Xavier said quietly.

He didn't ask about Erik either – though he did think very pointedly about bullets and guns and surgical blades for a moment - and into that stubborn silence Emma said nothing.

Emma stood and set her glass on the corner of Xavier's cluttered desk. "This has been most enlightening," she said. "But I'm afraid I must be going."

"It was a pleasure to finally meet you properly, Miss Frost," Xavier said. It was both a lie and the truth; he wasn't upset that she had visited, but now he wanted her out of his mind and out of his home. "I do hope we'll see each again soon."

"Stranger things have happened," Emma said. She let the words _enemies_ and _allies_ drift between them, without force and without comment.

Xavier didn't smile, but his expression wasn't precisely grim either. "Perhaps next time you'll tell me why you choose to disguise yourself as loyally subservient to men you are far too intelligent to follow with any genuine devotion."

Emma allowed herself a single raised eyebrow and a jab of deeply unimpressed disapproval, but Xavier didn't explain himself, and he didn't apologize.

Emma decided she almost liked that about him.

-

Four months later a letter arrived at their new safe house - _base_ now to some of them, yet still _home_ to none – with Emma's name above the address and a New York postmark in the corner.

"You gave this address to somebody?" Erik asked, his voice uncharacteristically high with disbelief.

"Of course not," Emma said.

"But somebody knows you're here," he pointed out.

Erik wasn't quite sure how angry or betrayed he ought to be. Any other time, Emma would be amused by his familiar suspicions – he hated to trust her even a little bit, and hated even more that he needed her too much to send her away - but she didn't recognize the handwriting on the envelope and she was absolutely certain she had never knowingly revealed the safe house location to anyone.

A knife hovered by her elbow – subtlety was not among Erik's strengths – so Emma plucked it from the air, slit the letter open and removed the single sheet of paper. Fine stationary, heavy and smooth, very similar to what she used when soliciting donations for the charitable projects her social standing required. The letter was only a few lines long. Emma glanced to the signature and pressed her lips together to hide a smile.

"You needn't worry," Emma said. At once Erik began to worry; he was so predictable. "It's only your friend Charles Xavier. I suspect he's known where you've been hiding all along."

She took advantage of Erik's stunned silence to read the letter:

 _Miss Frost,_

 _At least one more. Very suspicious fellow. Nefarious criminal activities and the like - exactly your type, if I'm not mistaken. Have you ever been to Egypt? I'm told the pyramids are lovely this time of year._

 _Regards,  
Charles Xavier_

So he had rebuilt his machine, and it was functional and powerful enough to locate a mutant telepath on the other side of the world. That was valuable knowledge – Emma knew Xavier intended for her to understand that – and she decided at once to keep it to herself. She returned the letter to the envelope and began to plan how she might rearrange her schedule to include a trip to Egypt. She had always wanted to expand her business interests into Africa.

"Do I even want to know why you're communicating with him?" Erik asked. She was used to the way he thought _Charles_ , a soft word made sharp as a gunshot in his mind, red with guilt and doubt and something very much like a child's jealous grief.

"No," Emma said. She smiled and patted Erik's arm in a gesture he always found unsettling. "You don't want to know. But you will thank me for it extravagantly someday."

-


End file.
